How Can ArtistData Suck Less for Indie Musicians?

ArtistData “help artists publish information to a variety of destinations with a single point of entry. Social networks, official websites, and much more”. I signed up for it a couple years ago with that same blind hope that they would share my gigs and information around the net better than I could. I stopped using them a year ago because they couldn’t. But with the new year, and a new desire to promote myself better, I logged on to try again… to see if I missed something. Again, I am disappointed.

One of the main areas I hoped ArtistData would be a valuable service is with gig submission. You submit a gig on their website once and they send your gig announcement to Eventful, JamBase, BandsInTown and many more. Cool right? If only, it was that easy.

I wanted ArtistData to submit to Reverbnation because that is my main mailing list. They don’t. However, there are other ways to get the information there. ArtistData do submit to Eventful, which I can import to Reverbnation. Unfortunately, they only send standard venue gigs to Eventful.

I perform at a lot of non-standard venues. When you’re an indie musician, you need to. You’ll see me at Renaissance festivals, house concerts, science fiction conventions, and more. I can submit all of those gigs directly to Eventful. ArtistData, on the other hand, will not submit that same information to Eventful. They only send standard gigs.

Basically, ArtistData does not submit gig information from non-standard venues. They are biased towards your basic popular gigs. I guess I should’ve expected that. But when they market towards those same indie musicians, you would think they would make some concessions. Apparently not.

So I guess the point of this is that if you are an indie musician who plays a bunch of non-standard venues, don’t bother with ArtistData. It is useless.

That said, if you’ve figured a way to circumvent that system, please let me know.